


burning

by ignitesthestars



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Kissing, Suicidal Thoughts, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships, Unresolved Emotional Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-05
Updated: 2017-10-05
Packaged: 2019-01-09 12:17:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12276303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ignitesthestars/pseuds/ignitesthestars
Summary: I take the bottle. I take a drink. It burns on the way down, and I think of all the ways a person can be on fire.“What are you doing, Katniss.”I drink some more, then let the bottle slip through my fingers. It thunks wetly to the ground, but neither of us make an effort to save it.





	burning

“Why didn't you kill yourself?”

Haymitch pauses halfway through holding a bottle out to me. “Hello, Katniss.” He tips it to his mouth instead. “Shouldn't you be playing in the dirt, fine morning like this?”

“It's past lunch.”

“Same difference.”

“It's raining.”

He gives me a once over, taking in my bedraggled appearance. Not that my appearance is anything but bedraggled these days, but I come with water today, dripping on his floor. Probably the cleanest it's been in weeks.

“You came here in the rain to ask me why I haven't killed l myself.”

 _Seemed better than actually doing it_.

“I fed your geese,” I say instead, but the glint in Haymitch’s eye says that he isn’t as drunk as he smells. Not yet, anyway. He considers me for long enough that I consider just grabbing the bottle off him and getting stuck in, before finally jerking his head towards the chair nearby him.

The one I always sit in. I keep standing, arms wrapped around my chest, scowling. This isn’t a conversation I want to settle in on.

“I suppose it’d be more heroic of me to say something about living for the people who were murdered.”

I raise my eyebrows - or at least, what’s grown in of them. Someone had tried to approach me with a pair of tweezers in the early days. I’m pretty sure I’d just vomited all over them, which was their own fault. 

Heroism has never been his thing.

“They would've swept it all under the rug,” he says abruptly. “The story’d be - You know what the story would be. Died saving a dozen children from a mining accident or something. Perfect Victor tragedy, neat and clean.”

“Nothing but the best.”

He bares his teeth and for a second I hear screams, hisses, _Katniss, Katniss._ I blink and it's a smile, grim art the edges, knowing in the eyes. 

“Biggest fuck you I could give them was me.” The bottle sloshes in his grasp as he holds or his arms. “And you, in the end.”

“You never had me,” I snap, but the truth is more complicated than that, because that's the world I live in now. Almost enough to make a person miss the Games, _kill or be killed_. I'm so tired of gray.

The truth is that Haymitch’s fingerprints are on whatever’s left of me, the same as Coin and the Capitol and Peeta and Prim. I swallow around the urge to throw up and swing a leg over his instead, straddling his knees. He tenses, but that glint is in his eyes still, that hideous and knowing thing.

I take the bottle. I take a drink. It burns on the way down, and I think of all the ways a person can be on fire.

“What are you doing, Katniss.”

I drink some more, then let the bottle slip through my fingers. It thunks wetly to the ground, but neither of us make an effort to save it.

“And now?” I ask, ignoring him. He's going to shove me off, or hit me, or start yelling if he's had enough already, and the prospect of the ice in my veins cracking for something is a heady thing.

What I don't expect is for him to answer.

“Why do you think I have the geese?”

We stare at each other.

“You only feed them when you want something.”

We're both disgusting people. I haven't showered in...a while, and he's sour and scratchy when I kiss him and heat curls in me anyway because this is - something. He kisses me as well, and it's something.

“Does anyone say no to you anymore, Katniss?”

I don't ask for things. I'm not even sure I'm asking for this, his mouth against mine, his hands out to the side and so carefully not touching my body.

 _Are you?_ But I don't say anything. I press both hands to his chest, feel his heart shuddering under one.

The other slides up higher, past the neck of his shirt, skin on skin. I rest my hand at the base of his throat, and he lets me.


End file.
